An Eastern Wing Story
Now, let Her tell the story: what would Ying-Ying write about the fated love,
parental censorship, illness, longings, attempted kidnap, politics, friendships, military
strategies, betrayals, and farewells? The world will never know. Thanks to How2, we
have a sample of poems written by contemporary Chinese female poets born in the 60s
and 70s, telling us about themselves and their lives. In this age of an increasingly
crowded global village, their lives share remarkable similarities with our lives in the
West.
Yet, despite the contemporary scenes and refreshingly self-assured female voice
in this work, the poetics of these poets reach deep into the long tradition of Chinese
poetry. The poetics represented here fundamentally embrace the system of understanding
underlined by the Chinese metaphysical concept of Heaven and Human are one
which denies separation of the subject and the object. True knowledge, in this respect,
cant be determined, given that mind and matter are the same, and observer and observed
are one. Such knowledge is fluid and multi-directional in time and space. The human is
not the only active participant in the game of knowledge. Heaven is more powerful,
more knowing and more ubiquitous. Yet Heaven does not equal God/gods in the
Western sense. Heaven entails the universe and the reasoning that embraces us all
and is part of things.
The apparent lack of syntactical structure and the non-directional collages of
image and action often found in Chinese poetry, including the work collected here, derive
from the requirement of such metaphysical understanding. Ezra Pound instinctively
picked up on this feature of classical Chinese poetry, and brought it to the West as a new
technique to enrich its poetic artillery without realizing the philosophical significance or
the distinct difference of the Chinese definition of things. He was ingenious in
attributing this feature to the Chinese writing system and its pictographic aspect which
lead him to invent imagism. Yet he still missed the metaphysical point at the bottom of it
all No ideas but in things demonstrates just how narrowly William Carlos Williams
and some imagists construed, and missed, the essence of Eastern thinking.
The difficulty of translation created by such writing is significant. Translators,
who are often poets not unfamiliar with imagism or other post-Poundian multi-
perspective writing strategies, are nevertheless perplexed by the seemingly arbitrary
usage of personal pronouns in many Chinese poets work as well as the fluid shifting
of perspectives, the animation of things without any warning, and the tenseless transition
of events defying a linear timeline, even when the poem is telling a story or following an
obvious plot. If nature and human are one, the subjective and objective are one, mind is
matter, and the conception of the world is not a human-centered activity, then the lack of
I in many Chinese poets work becomes perfectly understandable. The absence of I
is the manifestation of a presence everywhere, by every thing. Things have mind, or
rather things ARE mind or in Williams term, ideas are things. Animation is therefore
unnecessary.
These writers poems sometimes have the quality of dialogues between
interchangeable partners. Everything in a poem, I mean everything, is fluid: there is no
fixed reference frame. Everything is open to everything else. I turns into you, he, she,
it, we, they, etc. Time and space are things as well as other abstract thoughts and
concepts. Things tend to know themselves better than humans, who are simply other
things. The prepositional words used to position them, to pin them down, in turn
become meaningless or even misleading. Is pan-perspectival the best word to convey this
lack of a human-centered epistemological view?
On the other hand, like other Indo-European languages, English is a phonetic
language (i.e. it records the human voice to name things), and therefore it assumes a
human perspective and human-centered knowledge. The foundation for such knowledge
is the philosophical separation of mind and matter, of subjective and objective. Readers
need to keep in mind that the translators have to make some brave adjustments in
English, in order to re-create the energetic fluidity of the internal and external world
where these Chinese poets dwell.
Incidentally, Wings is a poetry journal in Beijing devoted to the work of female
poets. Many poets selected for this issue of How2 had been published in Wings before.
Notice the plural in the translated name, which is added to satisfy the logically
conditioned mind. Of course it has to be a pair, male and female, Eastern and Western,
for the take-off of an adventure. More works of these poets and of their male
counterparts will be collected in the Talisman Anthology of Contemporary Chinese
Poetry (ed. by Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong, Talisman House Publishers, New Jersey),
which is forthcoming later this fall.
Zhang Er
Olympia, WA
Feb. 17, 2006
Biographical Information: Poets & Translators
Poets:
Cao Shuying was born in Nov. 1979 in Haerbin of Heilongjiang Province. She is a
postgraduate student of Peking University and her major is comparative literature and
world literature. Her poems were collected in many Poetry Collections and was published
in periodicals such as Writers, People's Literature, Star, Poetry, etc. and in many non-
official poetry journals like Wings, Deviation, Selected Poems of 70's Poets,
Battlefield, Provinces, etc. She also writes prose and fairy tales besides poems.
Lan Lan was born Hu Lan Lan in 1967 in Yantai city, Shandong Province, China. She
graduated from Zhengzhou University in Henan Province in 1988. She began to publish
poems when she was fourteen years old, and had worked as a factory worker and a
literary editor. A winner of Anne Kao Poetry Prize in 1996, Lan Lan has published
several books of poetry, prose and childrens stories. She currently works at the Literary
Academy of Henan Province.
Ma Lan is a member of the Hui minority and was born in Meishan County, Sichuan in
the 1960s. In 1982 she began working in a bank, where she served as an accountant for
ten years. In 1993 she immigrated to the United States, first living in New York, and is
currently living at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. One of the originators of
the major online Chinese literary website Olive Tree (Ganlan shu), Ma Lan is currently
editor in chief. Her fiction, poetry and essays have appeared in magazines and
newspapers around the world, including Huacheng (Flower city), Da jia (The author),
Zhongshan (Bell mountain), Shanghai wenxue (Shanghai literature), Shiyue (October),
Jintian (Today), Lianhe wenxue (Unitas Literature), Qingxiang (The tendency), Renmin
wenxue (Peoples literature), Chuang shiji (Epoch), and Wanxiang (Panorama). A
German translation of her short story Shi cong (Hearing loss) appeared in 2003 in the
collection Das Leben ist jetzt: Neue Erzhlungen aus China. She is the author of the
poetry collection Zuo zai nali (Where shall I sit?) and the short story collection Hua fei
hua (Flowers are not flowers).
Tang Danhong was born in Cheng Du, Sichuan, a poet, documentary film maker, and
bookstore proprietor. Her work of poetry started to gain notice in the 90s by its wild
vocabularies and unusual associations.
Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York city in 1986. The
collections of her poetry Seen, Unseen was published by QingHai Publishing House in
1999 and Water Words was published by New World Poetry Press in 2002. Her poems
have also appeared in English translation in many poetry journals. Her chapbooks in
translation, Winter Garden, Verses on Bird and The Autumn of Gu Yao, Cross River, Pick
Lotus, Carved Water were published in recent years. Verses on Bird, Zhang Ers selected
poems in Chinese and English bilingual edition was published from Zephyr Press in
2004. She has read and lectured at international festivals, conferences, reading series and
universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong,
and in US. She teaches at The Evergreen State College in Washington.
Zhang Zhen started publishing poems in Chinese literary magazines as well as
underground venues in China since the early 1980s. While moving between Sween,
China, Japan and United States in the last two decades, she continued to write, publish
and take part in public readings. Her book of poetry Mengzhong louge (Dream Mansion)
was published by the Chunfeng Wenyi Publishing House in 1997. Zhang Zhen is also a
film scholar, currently teaching Cinema Studies at New York University. She is the
author of An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1897-1937
(University of Chicago, 2005).
Zhao Xia was born in September 1976 in Shanghai, freelancing as a poetry editor for
Internet poetry journals. She is the author of two volumes of poetry collection, Seven
Lilies in Barbarism and Paper-Back Spring. She lives in Germany and Nanjing.
Zhou Zan was born in 1968 in Ru Dong, Jiang Su province. She graduated from the
Chinese Department of Yang Zhou University in 1989 and obtained her Ph.D. in
Literature from Beijing University. She started writing poetry in university and is the
author of multiple publications including Dreaming or Self Questioning in 1999. She is
the editor of poetry journal Wings, which exclusively dedicated to womens writing.
Translators:
Martine Bellen is the author of five collections of poetry including The Vulnerability of
Order, Copper Canyon Press; Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, Sun & Moon Press,
which won the National Poetry Series Award; and Places People Dare Not Enter, Potes
& Poets Press. She's a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for
Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award. Ms. Bellen teaches at Rutgers
University.
Chen, Xiangyang, PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies, New York
University. Her research interests include Chinese Cinema, Hong Kong Cinema, Film
History/Historiography, and Film Genres. She is currently writing her dissertation on
Cantonese cinema.
Caroline Crumpacker lives with her partner Tom OMalley and their daughter Colette
in Upstate New York. She is an editor for Fence Magazine, a contributing editor for
Circumference and Double Change (an online magazine of French and American
poetries) and curator for the Bilingual Poetry Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club
in Manhattan. She received a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, MA in 2001/02. Her translations, essays, poems have appeared in the
books American Poets in the 21st Century: Who we are Now (Wesleyan University Press,
2005); Talisman Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry (Talisman, 2004); and Love
Poems by Younger American Poets (Verse Press, 2004), and in magazines including
American Letters and Commentary, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Can I Have My
Ball Back?, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, DoubleChange, Fence, The Germ, Gulf
Coast, Hors Bord (in French), jubilat, LOeil de Bouef (in French), Logopoeia, Lungfull!,
mem, No, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts, Poetry Project Newsletter, Seneca Review,
Shankpainter, Third Coast, and Volt.
Jennifer Feeley is a doctoral candidate in modern Chinese literature in the department of
East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her research focuses on
Chinese women poets' negotiations with gender-oriented stereotypes throughout the
twentieth century. Her translations have appeared in FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and
Poetics.
Huang, Canran was born in 1963 in the ancient city of Quanzhou, Fujian Province,
mainland China. He immigrated to Hong Kong in 1978 when he was 15 years old, but
returned years later to China and graduated from Jinan University, Guangzhou in 1988
with a degree in journalism. Since 1990, he has worked with Ta Kung Pao daily in Hong
Kong as an international news translator. He has published three books of poetry, a book
of essays on poetry and translation, and is currently editing an anthology of Hong Kong
poetry. He is also an acclaimed Chinese translator of many Western poets and writers.
Bob Holmans eighth and ninth books are A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a
collaboration with Chuck Close (Art of this Century/Pace Editions), and Carved Water
(Tinfish), his translations of the poetry of Zhang Er. He is Visiting Professor of Writing
at Columbia University and Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. He is Artistic Director
of Study Abroad on the Bowery, an applied poetics program launched in 2005, and
publisher of Bowery Poetry Press.
Charles A. Laughlin was born in Minneapolis. He received his B.A. in Chinese
Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1988, and went on to
complete a Ph.D. in Chinese Literature at Columbia University in 1996. Since then, he
has taught at Yale University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Chinese
Literature. His first book, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience,
was published by Duke University Press in 2002, with a Chinese translation forthcoming.
He is currently completing a book on the modern Chinese essay entitled The Literature of
Leisure and Chinese Modernity.
Rachel Levitskys first full length volume of poetry, Under the Sun, was published by
Futurepoem books in 2003. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, Dearly,
(a+bend, 1999), Cartographies of Error (Leroy, 1999), The Adventures of Yaya and
Grace (PotesPoets, 1999), 2 (1x1)Portraits (Baksun, 1998) and Dearly, 3,4,6 (Duration
Press, 2005). She is one of Zhang Ers poet translators.
Bill Ransoms poetry was nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Award. Hes published six novels and numerous short stories, most recently in Carve
magazine. A CD of his recent poetry collection, War Baby, is available from Wordman
Production Company. He teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia,
Washington.
Judith Roche, poet, arts educator, editor, arts programmer, is the author of two poetry
collections, Myrrh/ My Life as a Screamer and Ghosts. She received an American Book
Award for co-editing First Fish First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim. She
has taught poetry workshops and residencies extensively to adults, students, prisoners and
others and is Literary Arts Director for One Reel, an arts events organization.
Eleni Sikelianoss two new books are The California Poem (Coffee House), and The
Book of Jon (Nonfiction; City Lights). Previous books include The Monster Lives of Boys
& Girls (Green Integer, National Poetry Series), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House), and The
Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo). She has been conferred numerous awards for her poetry,
nonfiction and translations.
Susan M. Schultz is Professor of English at the University of Hawai`i in Honolulu. She
is author of three volumes of poetry, most recently And then something happened (Salt,
2004), and A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry
(Alabama, 2005). She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry
(Alabama, 1995). In 1995 she founded Tinfish Press, which specializes in experimental
poetry from the Pacific.
